Friday, July 31, 2009

Thursday, July 30, 2009

Okay, GatesGate is wearing me out, but I gotta link one more post, because Fred at Slacktivist has such a good one up:

Job must have done something, they decide, even though they know as well as we do that this isn't the case. The narrator was very clear on this point. "This man was blameless and upright," the story says, "he feared God and shunned evil." Those are the rules of this story. But those rules are terrifying. If a "blameless" man can suddenly lose his home, wealth, health and family, then none of us is safe. So Job's friends spend the first half of the play blaming the blameless man.

I live in the South. There’s a little “family owned”business here that’s proudly racist. There’s a “White History Year” sign on the front door of the place and lynching photos and other”memorabilia” are prominently displayed and easily visible through the front windows. Recently the owner of this shop recieved a civic award for his civil war reinactment camp for(white,male only)kids. Everyone knows the place is a front for KKK/skinhead types and no one bats an eyelash. The place is smack in the middle of the newly rennovated “historic district”.Here’s a hint for Hawkins: You don’t have to worry about being called a racist if you aren’t a fucking racist. I’ve lived 50 yrs and no one has ever even hinted I was racist. Wonder why that is?….

Sunday, July 26, 2009

So when we get to a bookstore, which we hardly ever do these days, I am eagerly anticipating, hungry to buy a book -- even two books if I can manage it. I want a book!

So there I am in the new SF section, hoping against hope that, finally, Jesus, please, let there be a book I want to read, because I love science fiction, I have loved it since I found a copy of Heinlein's Have Space Suit Will Travel on the library shelf when I was eleven years old.

But no. It's more of the same crap. Ever since 9/11, all we get are the Armchair commandos, spinning their xenophobic warhammer fap fap fap....and the same dozen of them, may I add? I wouldn't mind them getting published, since obviously there is a market. Obviously plenty of adolescent-minded fellas out there eat this sort of fiction up. They must, it keeps getting published.

But can't we have something else? Just now and then?

I pick up the Best S&FF for 2008. Same old writers, mostly male, with the stock two or three women as always -- because no new writers exist, I guess.

It's not, btw, that other writers, writing other things, writing good stories, don't exist, or aren't getting published, even -- as some argue. It's that the big publishing houses and mainstream magazines and awards, who have a lock on the mainstream market, are controlled by this coterie, and right now that's all they're publishing, this one sort of fiction.

Small presses might save us -- Perfect Circle, for instance, one of the best books I've ever read, published by Small Beer Press, and Kage Baker's first novel had to be published overseas, though now she's been picked up by Tor.

Too much to hope that the SF world would actually start thinking, I suppose: look around and learn and publish for a wider audience?

(I did not, in the end, buy anything from the SF section. I came home and bought Verb Noire's first publication instead.)

Saturday, July 25, 2009

I swear, if I hear one more Right-Wing Tool say "What we have to do now is look forward...."

Apparently it doesn't even matter what they're talking about. Liz Cheney was talking about the moronic Birthers and spewed the line. Trying to weasel out of having to admit that the obsession with Obama's birth certificate was looney, and rather than just say, "Yes, of course Obama was born in the USA," or, "Yes, of course people who say he's not an American citizen are focusing on the wrong thing," or even, "Yes, of course Obama is an American citizen," what does she say?

"We need to look forward now, not backward."

What in shit does that even mean in this context?

It's like they've got ten things they can say, like they're fucking wind-up dolls, and they just spit these phrases out.

Friday, July 24, 2009

Ta-Nehisi Coates meditates on the Police -- specifically, the woman who called the police when she saw what she believed was two men breaking into Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s house.

He notes he would not have called the police under those circumstances, and goes on to muse on the circumstances under which he might call the police -- very few; over on Unfogged, they have a similar thread.

See, because for many of us in America, the police are not protectors, they are oppressors. It's what I was saying in the previous thread: they do not, in fact, protect "us." They protect them, those rich (white) folk up on the hill. (Yeah, I'm white, and I'm at least tentatively middle-class, but I'm on the edge of poverty, and I drive a crappy car and come from the trailer class, and frequently get pulled over for Driving While Poor.) You don't call for the police, in this class, and you aren't pleased to see them when they show up.

This became clear to me a year or so ago, when TOLP, who comes from a very different class, had her wallet stolen. When my wallet was stolen, about nine years ago, I shrugged it off -- well, okay, I cursed and muttered, and said bad words. But that's all I did. Then I went and got a new driver's license and shit. When the folks at the state asked why I said I had lost my wallet.

TOLP called the police. Then she pressed for an investigation. Then she followed up on the fucker, dogging the police and shit, going down to the cop shop of her own free will, and -- shit, she made me go to the cop shop, one of the scarier moments of our relationship. Who goes to visit the police when they ain't have to? Bint's obviously crazy.*

I cannot think of a single circumstance under which I would call the police -- well, maybe if I guy was breaking into my house with a chainsaw. Maybe. Probably even then I would just run out the front door.

I've read a ton of comments from (white) people on various liberal blogs that say something like this: Yes, Gates was innocent, but everybody knows you don't talk back to the police. Why didn't he just put his head down and say yes, sir, of course sir, here's my ID sir? What kind of fool is he? Or they say something like, well, your sympathies might be with Gates, but the police deal with lunatics and jerks all day long, and many of them are dangerous, and they can't afford to take chances, and the police do this for very little money, the police are there to protect us, which Gates should have realized, so--

This is the problem with these comments, as Obama knows, and those writing here do as well: Two different Americas exist. Rich/Middle class white folk get to live in one, and maybe there the police exist to protect "us"; people of color, particularly, and to some extent poor white folk live in a different America.

Maybe you should shut up and listen to what you're getting told about that place, just one time. How would that be?

Only they aren't any better at thinking that over than at much else, apparently. This Robert Broadus argues that he should not have to be taxed for health care, see, because of the bill of rights, which he believes means he should not have to pay taxes for health care if he doesn't want to, since he has not been buying health insurance, which has been saving him (he says) $2,500/year and he's been doing fine with that.

"What if you get sick?" he is asked.

"What if you break a leg?" he is asked.

"Who pays then?"

Of course, we would -- his fellow citizens -- unless his family is filthy rich -- which, since he says earlier he's been helping to support them, I somehow doubt is the case.

So if he gets sick, his fellow taxpayers will foot the bill, because I really doubt he will just eat his gun. But that's not the point! He's a free citizen! We can't MAKE him pay for a health care system just because he might use it some day!

Wednesday, July 22, 2009

Hereis what I keep pointing out to my students and anyone else that will listen to me:

The United States now devotes one-sixth of its economy to medicine. Divvy that up, and health care will cost the typical household roughly $15,000 this year, including the often-invisible contributions by employers. That is almost twice as much as two decades ago (adjusting for inflation). It's about $6,500 more than in other rich countries, on average.

This is one fight I have a dog in, living where I do, in NW Arkansas, home of both Wal-Mart and Tyson.

This bit of the world is littered with chicken ranches and Wal-Mart wealth: it makes for a schizophrenic landscape. On the one hand, appalling poverty, since the people who run the chicken farms and work in the chicken factories are, in general, stunningly poor. I'm talking missing teeth, can't make the light-bill poor -- I have their kids in my classes, from time to time, and I get essays; or I'll get a wife or a fifty year old man who can't manage the work at the chicken factory anymore (it's physically awful, just wrecks the body) who has come back to school hoping she can or he can get off disability that way.

They hate living on the state, btw.

Usually the one with jobs at Wal-Mart are just as poor, and often just as physically damaged.

On the other hand: the executives have these houses that look like small hotels, or maybe the sort of mini-castle some nine year old who had watched too much Disney would think up. "God lives there," mr. delagar likes to say, as we drive past. And these houses are right next to the rat-trap shacks and trailers the line-workers live in; Marie Antoinette drives right past the peasants, here in Arkansas, in her shiny red Beamer.

She's safe enough though I guess. Nearly every one of my freshmen is still Republican. They're all going to live in a house just like hers some day, see, and they just know when that happens they won't want anyone taxing their money away, money they earned fair and square....

Anyway, not what I started out to say.

The cost of the chicken, the cost of the tennis shoe, the cost of the teeshirt.

Wal-Mart sells teeshirts for five bucks, Tyson sells chickens for six bucks. Never mind that the teeshirts suck and the chickens taste like flavorless gum. They're cheap! So America will buy them.

Are they cheap? That's the point.

They only look cheap: that's the point being made by Ezra's post, and the book he links to.

It's also what anyone who thought for half a minute could figure out.

If Wal-Mart and Tyson (and so on) do not pay the health costs of their employees (just to take a random point) does that mean their employees do not have health costs?

If they do not pay the retirement costs of their employees does that mean those employees do not have retirement costs?

If they don't pay their employees enough to live on, does that mean their employees starve?

No: sometimes their employees have wives or husbands who get jobs; but sometimes they get earned income back in taxes. Who pays that? Why, you do!

Who pays the retirement benefits (in the form of disability pay)? Why, you do!

Who pays the health cost, since no insurance gets bought? (Can't buy it on what they're paid.) Why, you do, taxpayer!

Add all that to the price of your chicken and teeshirt, not to mention the subsidies you're already paying to the farmers that grow the cotton and the chicken feed and probably the chicken, and jeez that shirt isn't so cheap now, is it?

Wal-Mart is making a fortune on America's back. You're paying for the Disney House. Too bad they don't let you come visit.

Saturday, July 18, 2009

I don't know if you caught Uncle Pat on Rachel Maddow the other night, with his rant about how it was "reverse racism" to put Sotomayor on the SCOTUS, because, after all, this country was built by 100% white males, and 100% of the people who died at Gettsyburg and Vicksburg were white males, and nearly 100% (at least he said nearly that time!) 100% of the men who died on D-Day were white males, and --

It's like that bit in that stupid book by Stephen King, I forget which one it was, the one where the plague is let loose and 99.9% of the country dies, and the feminist Fannie or Frannie, I forget her name, finds a big strong Texan to protect her, and has this epiphany that feminism was just a silliness made possible by the big strong men that had created the safe modern world. Feminists, she decides, ought to be made to cross-stitch a thank you to all the big strong men who had conquered the west and built the country, fap fap fap, which even when I was fifteen I knew was a pile of heaping steaming SHIT.

I just got done teaching Swift in WLIT II, which is one of my Summer II classes this summer (World Literature from 1650 to the Present in Five Weeks! Yowza!). We read the bit of Gulliver where he visits the horses, and A Modest Proposal, always a joy. Getting students to understand satire, an Irish/English satire, when they don't know much about history, American politics, or their own economic situation (they all think the poor are poor because they just don't work hard enough, by golly), is enough to make me want to retire to my back stoop with my bottle of black strap rum, as I would if it weren't 106 out there most afternoons.

And if I weren't too broke to buy rum these days anyway. Which is really sad.

Who think America's most pressing concern is abortion and gun control. My ear. My neck. My back teeth! Here in Pork Smith, we're running out of gas money by the second week in every month, and you're carping on about gun control and whether it's the 21st or the 22nd month that defines viability? Jeebus Jumping Christ.

So: here's my new idea. Swift thought we should eat the poor. I think we should eat the rich. A nice brick-oven BBQ. We can start with Rich Rethuglicans. I know they'll be bitter and tough and nasty. But -- evolution in action! What do you say? (/satire, obviously.)

Tuesday, July 14, 2009

I am reluctant for a couple of reasons. One, she's eleven, and two, she's given, as I may have mentioned, to long bouts of existential angst.

So, well, the first time she gets a comment from some lout who tells her she's a loser, yikes.

Or worse, what if she doesn't get comments! (I've been around the 'sphere. Billions of blogs get no comments at all.)

Or what if she gets comments like HEY U GRATE SUX NOW?

For all these reasons, I have told her she has to be twelve before she can have her own blog -- only she really wants one now, first, and second, I sense that the heyday of blogging is peaking now, and that if we wait another year, well, blogs will be out with roadsters and eight-track tapes.

Monday, July 13, 2009

(1) Okay, so you have to understand a couple of things for this first one.

Number one, it is hot in Arkansas in the summer. I am talking killing hot. A hundred and four here yesterday at six p.m., so hot that when I took the trash out the air felt scary: standing on my driveway felt like standing in an oven.

Second, my university is always short of parking, but this summer even more so, since construction guys are rebuilding everything, not only tearing up parking lots, but parking giant construction trucks and tools everywhere on the lots, as well as roping off the lot you drove merrily down the highway planning to park in. Also, there is very little shaded parking space, but there is some, and getting that shaded space makes a huge difference -- if you can park your car in the shade, then when you emerge from a long day of teaching composition and Jonathon Swift, your car will be relatively cool and your nearly useless ancient car AC will keep you nearly cool all the way home, instead of your car being 135 degrees inside and you having to drive home with the windows down, broiling and cussing in the 104 degree heat, sun beating down on the top of your head, and when I say you here I mean me.

So I get up an hour earlier than I have to most days so I can get to school early enough to get one of the few parking places in the shade. (There are only about six.) Only today when I arrive, what do I find? All of them gone -- and -- and --and! Why are all of them gone? Well, the construction guys have three of them, and I can't really grudge them that. They're actually working all day in the sun while I have my office job with all day air conditioning, so, okay.

BUT! Two of the other spaces? Are taken by this TOOL in a giant white SUV. He has parked his giant SUV across the line of two spaces, so that he can take BOTH SHADED SPACES, so that no one will park too close to his purty SUV and nick his pretty paint job. (Of course he has backed into the parking space, because that is so much safer and more convenient.) Then he has covered all his interior windows with foil sunscreens to protect his seat covers.

I idled by the space a minute. Never have I ever wanted to key anyone's vehicle before. Ever. Ever.

But I took a deep breath, though what Rabbi Hilleh would want me to do, and drove on. Parked my car in the broiling sun, and hiked in.

(2) Did you know MLK Jr. was a Republican? Hey! So was Abraham Lincoln! Maybe we should let Ms. Sparkle know that? Or send her a history book, except, well, she'd have to be able to read, so what's the point?

(4) Plus, everything is breaking. The AC broke -- I told you about that. Then the stove broke. Now the dishwasher is broken, and the dryer isn't working, and the hard-drive on the kid's computer is down, and the vacuum cleaner died. Some of this stuff the landlords will fix, as soon as they get back from Florida (they're spending a month in Florida), or they say they will fix these things; but lots of them are our problem. Money money money, water water water.

Saturday, July 11, 2009

Here is the story Drudge is pushing and the Right-Wing (which, in case you need reminding is not racist, no, no, no!) is buying with big wide eyes and both hands: this home-schooling, charming family of Xtians in Akron, Ohio, who were off at a 4th of July Celebration, Celebratin' teh Freedom, as they manage to make clear about 15 times in this here news clip, claim that on the way home from their 4th of July Freedom Celebratin' they got Attacked by...a Black Mob.

Fifty! Black! Kids!

Yeah, you heard it right. And they were, like, yelling, "It's a Black World!"

And they punched and kicked Daddy in the head and when sweet 90 pound daughter sprang to his defense, they knocked her down and kicked her too!

Daddy says he spent five nights in intensive care! That's how badly he was beaten.

Yet you'll notice in the news clip...hmmm....no bruises on any of them? Not a nick or a scratch? Nor, well, jeez...none of them look particularly upset?

Also, they claim they were coming to the aid of a threatened buddy, yet the buddy isn't here to say, yeah, it happened just that way?

As you know, I lurk on the Right-Wing blogs (as much as I can bear to). I used to comment, on the few blogs over there that allow comments (many of them do not, which I speculate has to do with their authoritarian natures: no one is allowed to speak in this house but Daddy), except, well, no matter how polite and reasonable I attempted to be (and I swear! I swear! I tried polite and reasonable!) I always ended up being banned, almost always for the high crime of using that evil tool, reason, against them.

(1) It will "be like the post office," by which they mean, well, I don't know. What's wrong with the post office? I love the post office. For less then fifty cents they bring letters from anywhere in the country right to my door. For far less than ten bucks, they bring books, DVDs, toys, exotic foods -- well, you get the picture -- again, right to my door. They don't require me to be home, either, as UPS and Fed Ex frequently do. They'll leave the package in my parked car, if I leave it unlocked, or tucked out of sight behind my stoop wall.

When I go into the post office, my post office folk are friendly and efficient. They remember not only me but the kid and that she likes science and manga. If the line is getting long, as it always is around lunch and three o'clock (redneck rushhour, mr. delagar calls this) they do what they can to sort things and move them along, though of course they can only do so much -- at lunch, some of them are eating, too, and at all times, only so many of them are on shift.

And I am living in a small city, less than a hundred thousand people. Some of the Right-Wing folk might be living in bigger places. I suspect, though, that their main complain is that, where they live, the post office is staffed by "those" people. You know -- N.O.C.D.*

Which is what they're afraid of -- that if socialized medicine comes, why, Black and Brown people might easily get put into positions where they could be telling good White People to stand in line! What to Do! Denying WHITE PEOPLE the right to -- to --

Well, it doesn't matter. World Turned Upside Down, that's the point here.

(You can tell this is what they're worried about by reading between the lines of their screeds. They almost never openly say "black people" when they're speaking about their experience with the post office or their experiences with public hospitals. But watch for code words -- "fingernails this long," or "that hair," or "popping that gum the way they do"-- dogwhistle terms they all understand.)

(2) Poor people will get medicine too. This is bad. Some of them come right out and say this. We can't give the poor access to medicine because then they'll survive and who wants this? Others pretend to care about the poor, but, as in Doctor Wife Mom's blog, you can see she really only wants medicine going to her tribe -- rich white people with health insurance. (In other posts she's been snitty and angry about nasty slutty women -- she's careful not to say black women -- who have dozens of abortions, using abortions, she claims, as birth control. She says she's seen plenty of these women in her years as a doctor.)

People without health insurance, or people without money? Well, they're really not on Doctor Wife Mom's radar. I'm guessing she doesn't even really consider them people. They're not in her Tribe, are they? How could they be people, then? People in her Tribe need the Best Medical Care Evah, which means no rationing, no Socialized Medicine, no sparing of any attempt to squeeze even an extra second, damn the cost, full speed ahead....but those poor (brown) people over there across the county that can't afford to pay the $1500.00 it would cost for a day in the ER, and so can't get this nifty wonderful care that's been keeping her Daddy going? Well, she just can't see them at all.

(Which this is what's been happening to one of my students -- I'm not drawing that figure out of a hat. She's a black woman with three kids, two hers and one a niece she's taken in. She had chest pains back in May, went to the ER, because she has no health insurance. She works a minimum wage job 30 hours a week and goes to school part time. They work her up, run some tests. She gets a bill a few days later for just over 1500 dollars, which did I mention she's got three kids in the house and is working for minimum wage? So the next time she gets chest pains, guess what she does? She lies down and waits for them to go away.**)

(3) It will cost a lot of money, which will raise taxes. Waaah! Those Lie-brals are so stupid for calling it "Free" health care! Okay, first, who is saying that socialized medicine is "free"? Second, yes, taxes, boogah-boogah. You know what else we pay taxes for? Roads, the FDA, the military, National Parks, the Supreme Court, hundreds of other things we want and need. Socialized medicine is something most of us want and need. Also, does anyone think we are not paying for medical care now? Some sources I've seen say we're paying one-fifth of our GNP for the lousy medical care we get now. I know a huge chunk of my personal income goes straight to medical care -- first the insurance, that comes off the top, and then I write a dozen checks to the various doctors I owe money to, around town (the surgeon who did my shoulder, the three separate dentists we are always in hock to, the orthodontist, the anesthesiologist I am still paying off, for my surgery which was done in December, the check to the clinic for my daughter's test, from three years ago, I'm still paying those off...) -- and this isn't counting the money for our prescription drugs and the little incidental medical expenses that keep coming up: mr. delagar needs a new CPAP machine, or the kid loses a filling...so you know what? Slightly higher taxes? Do you think I actually care?

What they're really worried about, of course, is Brown people getting something for nothing. Brown people don't pay taxes -- it's a Right-Wing article of faith. So if we have socialized medicine, well, all those NOCD people will be getting a free ride! Bad enough they get a free education and all that free welfare! Now they'll get free X-Rays and free chemotherapy, oh, you can just see steam coming out of the wingnut ears.

*In England, this was Not Our Class, Dear. In America, of course, it's Not Our Color, Dear.

I went to a sex-segregated HS in Jefferson Parish: my brothers got Physics and Latin, along with actual teachers with actual degrees in the subjects they were teaching. They also had a real gymnasium. I got civics and a "science" teacher who had taught second grade the previous year. We walked across a highway to use the beat-up parish gymnasium and baseball fields, and played volleyball all year long because that was the only sports equipment our school had.

(I did take Latin my junior and senior year -- they bussed us over to the boys' school -- because they were trying to appease the wicked feminists who were objecting to the inequity in the system; no one did anything about the rest of my inept teachers, though. Well, they weren't training me to be a scholar. They were training me to be a young lady.)

Tuesday, July 07, 2009

You might remember Waxman from back when he went up against the Abstinence-Only crowd; now he's working on Health Care. But he's done plenty in DC. When the Whacks on the Right tell you Government Doesn't Work, here's the guy you point to in response.

It's end of Summer I and start of Summer II (back to back, so we can slam two semesters into one summer, for ever more fun & games), so I'm a bit jammed up, which is why the light posting -- grades are due on Monday, even if classes just ended Friday, and of course that is also when Summer II classes begin, Monday, aargh, with me teaching two classes, Freshman Comp II and World Lit II.

At least they aren't new preps: I've taught them both before.

Unfortunately, a side effect over Verb Noire taking Martin's War is that ALL I WANT TO DO IS WRITE. Teach? Prep? Research/Finish my paper on Chaucer's Prioress's Tale? Laundry and cooking and shopping? Bah! I am a writer, you see: why should I do all this other silliness?

Wednesday, July 01, 2009

On the Bill Maher show a few weeks ago, all the rich folk living in DC were commenting how this didn't feel like a Depression, did it? Hmm? and I wanted to leap through the screen and bat all of them over the head, because maybe it doesn't feel like a Depression if you're a rich tool living in DC, rich tool, but come live as a middle class or working class yoick here in AR, tool, or some worse off place in the country (Oddly, I'm hearing there are worse off places that Arkansas right now! That's so bizarre! That people are poorer than us?) and get back to me.

For the past week we've been down to the quarters and dollars in our change jar (you know, the jar on that shelf above the dryer? Where you dump all your loose change you find lying about in the washing machine or around the house in general?); then, on the 25th, we got a check from the insurance company for just under two hundred dollars, money back on a bill we had paid at the beginning of the month -- oh joy! -- and I ran it to the bank and put it in -- and we're watching like hawks for it it clear -- and it doesn't and doesn't and doesn't -- so finally I went in on the 29th, because we're eating oatmeal for dinner at this point, and the woman tells me it takes five business days, yap yap yap.

I hate banks. Hate hate hate.

But she gave me a hundred cash against when it cleared, which I thought was decent of her.

And now we've been paid, and can buy food again, and pay bills.

My student who teaches the kid art was by yesterday -- another lower middle class kid -- expressed joy when I paid him. He'd been driving on fumes, and getting really nervous.